The Challenge of Governing

...Or consider the assignments awaiting Slurley Hufstedler when she became the first Secretary of Education in 1979 Her priorities "were generally considered to be school desegregation, the distribution of Federal funds to schools, student loans, the persistence of functional illiteracy, and shoring up financially troubled colleges and universities " For starters What distinguishes Lynn from the zealots lately descended on Washington is his recognition that daunting obstacles to successfully solving seemingly intractable problems do not give us li-censetoabandontheeffort Further,he demonstrates that it is facile to blame Federal managerial ills on that old bugbear, ineffectual public employees Surely there is incompetence and laziness in government, perhaps to a greater degree than in comparable private sector organizations Yet just as surely the difference is exaggerated in the public mind Secretary of the Treasury Donald T Regan has on several occasions commented that his greatest surprise in coming to the capital has been the dedication and intelligence of the career managers in his department Over the last decade or so many people have deemed the government's purposes worthy of their best efforts, and Washington has attracted an impressive number of fine employees Civil Service rules also draw fire, and they do create some problems But here, too, the criticism is often facile Interestingly, the guarantee of job security, a common target of Civil Service detractors, has lately received strong support from researchers on Japan A key to that nation's industrial—and managerial—successes, they suggest, is the policy of lifetime employment practiced by Japanese corporations Lynn's detailed chapter exploring the exact nature of the contrasts between private and public administration is the most satisfying part of Managing the Public's Business Heacknow-ledges that many businesses are checked somewhat in their pursuit of profits (e g by pollution regulations or antidiscrimination laws) As Lynn rightly notes, though, what is an external constraint for a businessman is at thecenter of a public manager's job, he must try to balance incompatible social policies This leads to what Lynn calls Murphy's Law of Politics " No matter what you do, you should have done something else " For government decisions are made in the political arena, where generally sharp disagreements exist on what ought to be done in any given situation Consequently, the public context demands a range of skills that businessmen need only to a limited degree In addition, Lynn observes, the public manager has much less flexibility and less control within his organization than a private sector manager The agenda of a government executive "is largely formed by the sudden action of others the President or one of his aides, a congressional committee, a state or local official It is not unlike a top corporate executive having to cope with the demands created by a new takeover bid or an unanticipated strike every week " The political environment thus wreaks havoc with aims that require patience and sustained effort, a vexation compounded by the short tenure of political executives compared with their counterparts in private life As for internal authority, Lynn cites instances of a corporate executive dramatically reorganizing his company, taking it out of one field and putting it into another—a move that is clearly impossible in the public context Managing the Public's Business displays an impressive grasp of the relevant literature and is rich with advice to public executives If some of Lynn's specific suggestions do not seem applicable in these early revolutionary Reagan days, one expects that normal times will return and those tips, too, will beof value With evident approval Lynn quotes Wallaces Sayre'saphorism that "business and government administration are alike mall unimportant respects " Part of Lynn's message, however, is that one way to improve public management is to get government executives to care about managing—to realize that this is important and requires as much resourcefulness as more politicized concerns Here, the general experience of practitioners and students in the private sector could certainly be helptul Lessons learned in the private world will not make managing a public agency a piece ot cake, but, along with Lynn's insights, they may help avert a terminal case ot indigestion...

...The Challenge of Governing Managing the Public's Business By Laurence E Lynn Jr Basic 211 pp $14 95 Reviewed by Steven Kelman Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard, author, "Regulating America, Regulating Sweden A Comparative Study of Occupational Safety and Health Policy" These are times that try the souls of those who take an interest in how the Republic's business is managed A revolution in the role Washington plays in American life is under way, and such Reagan eggers-on as Rowland Evans and Robert Novak enthusiastically describe the President's program as "radical," even labeling its supporters "ideologues " Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lap-ham, writing in the Washington Post, recently explained the phenomenon by noting the disturbing similarity between the New Left of the '60s and today's "Reaganauts " Both are instances of a group of privileged people who nurse a deep animus against important features of the society pushing simplistic notions to redeem our sullied nation Indeed, when Ronald Reagan spoke of the Federal government during his campaign, one might have thought he was inveighing against the regime in Poland or East Germany The Washington bureaucracy, in his eyes, was an alien, usurping force, and the vital task was to "get it off the people's backs " This assessment, in my view, was wildly unfair and inaccurate—but worthy of a revolutionary In pressing his revolution since taking office, the President threatens to deprive serious public management students of their subject by undermining its legitimacy If the functions of gov-ernmentaretobedenouncedand, wherever feasible, eliminated, then the value of figuring out how to administer them declines dramatically Moreover, during periods of upheaval principles relating to the workings of the whole process in normal times rarely retain much relevance Laurence E Lynn Jr, who has served in a number of agencies on both the domestic and national security fronts, as well as in the White House under Henry Kissinger, nevertheless believes in the validity of the central point of his new book, Managing the Public's Business Simply put, it is that all the tough issues tend to get dumped into the policy maker's lap, while the relatively easy ones are left to the private sector He offers some pithy illustrations "Government executives must be directly and immediately concerned with a range of effects on society vastly wider than that confronting private executives Secretary of the Interior Cecil An-drus, for example, found himself facing the choice between a proposal by the International Whaling Commission that the United States endorse a moratorium on all killing of the endangered bowhead whale and an opposing view by the Eskimo, Indian and Aleut communities of Alaska, which hunt the whale according to age-old customs for dietary subsistence and for the income garnered from carvings and other handicrafts Choosing between the survival of a species and that of an entire way of life is a problem that does not confront the corporate executive...